Tag Archives: The Skyliners

Lately, with oldies stations going out of business, I’ve been trying to gather up some of the old Time-Life “Rock N’ Roll Era” collections which bring the experience of radio-style pleasure and surprise as close to my CD player as anything can these days.

By “lately” I basically mean the last three or four years. I started with the “Roots of Rock” collections (which cover the early fifties) and I just completed the fifties this week when I finally acquired the second volume from 1959.

The sixties can wait, I guess. I got a limited budget to say the least.

But these things really are marvelous.

1959 is supposed to be one of rock’s “lost” years–part of the long stretch between Elvis going in the Army and the Beatles arriving on Sullivan (a faked up narrative–not entirely discredited even today–that I wrote about a bit here).

Some lost year: “La Bamba,” the Coasters, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, the Drifters,, “Since I Don’t Have You,” and on and on, with these twenty-two mostly classic sides representing barely a drop in the ocean.

But not much under the sun speaks to how far “rock ‘n’ roll” had come–and how fast and wide-ranging the journey into culture shock had been–like the segue here from the Platters to Eddie Cochran at tracks 6 and 7.

Just those names alone: The Platters….Eddie Cochran, are bound to call up a head-swiveling, neck-snapping series of associations. Smooth crooning to rockabilly rebellion. But, in that moment and every moment since, they were/are connected at the hip.

And the two songs included here weren’t just any Platters or any Eddie Cochran–they were “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” and “C’mon Everybody.”

Talk about traveling some.

“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” was one of many examples where rock ‘n’ rollers took classic Tin Pan Alley material and improved it a thousand fold over any and all previous takes (some of which were plenty great themselves). And, without doing anything as radical as, for instance, what the Marcels would shortly thereafter achieve with “Blue Moon,” the Platters’ re-imagining is still breath-taking.

It also is one of hundreds of examples of early rock ‘n’ roll records (you know, what people actually bought and listened to) laying waste to the notion that it was, more or less exclusively, “teen” music.

Not that there was/is anything wrong with being a teen and making (or listening to) age specific music. Eddie Cochran singing about the good time he’s gonna have while the folks are out of the house isn’t less valid (or less brilliant) than classic pop at its best.

But–coming straight out of Tony Williams’ spine-tingling build at the end of “Smoke” (a climax which, in terms of combining pop’s version of operatic discipline and rock’s very specific version of what Lester Bangs used to call “passion expressed,” has not been matched by anyone but Roy Orbison in the long years since)–it really does help set the wide, wide boundaries of the revolution.

And it does that even before Cochran’s own climactic “Who cares?” takes his beat-driven story of suburban good times–which up to then is a pretty clear descendant of Mickey and Judy scheming to put on a show with the other kids that will end with the grown-ups tapping their feet to the new sound–into a new and dangerously giddy place.

Funny, but nothing quite explains why rock ‘n’ roll was not–and is not–quite like other music the way actually listening to it does.